Comparing Jobs
When we train learners, we want to know where they are coming from. Some of our learners are brand new to a job and don’t really know much so we start from the beginning. Often our learners come from some other job. It may be a very similar job and they move up in their careers. It could be a very different job and they are transferring or making a career change. The thing is, it’ll help if we can compare the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) for different jobs to see the real differences.
Another benefit to this is to help learners manage their careers and long term plans. Let’s us the restaurant industry for example, say we find two roles of Cooks, Restaurant (35-2014.00) and Food Service Managers (11-9051.00). Now these are very different jobs but they work together every day. At times, Restaurant Cooks see an opportunity to grow their career and could desire to move up into a manager role. At first glance, we can tell there are some significant differences between the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for someone to be a cook or a manager. There are things the manager needs to know and do that cooks don’t have to know or do and vice versa. But what exactly are those differences? How big of a gap is there between them? It may be fair to say managers are often cross-trained so they can back up other jobs when short handed but that is a type of training we prepare for.
Using ONET, look up these two jobs.
Cooks, Restaurant (35-2014.00)
Food Service Managers (11-9051.00)
Look at the most important KSAs for each job.
| KSA | Cooks, Restaurant | Food Service Managers |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge | Food Production, Customer and Personal Service, English Language, Production and Processing, Administration and Management | Customer and Personal Service, Administration and Management, English Language, Personnel and Human Resources, Food Production |
| Skill | Monitoring, Active Listening, Speaking, Critical Thinking, Coordination | Service Orientation, Monitoring, Active Listening, Speaking, Management of Personnel Resources |
| Ability | Near Vision, Problem Sensitivity, Information Ordering, Speech Recognition, Manual Dexterity | Oral Comprehension, Oral Expression, Problem Sensitivity, Written Comprehension, Deductive Reasoning |
You can see a few KSAs for both jobs but each job does have some KSAs the other does not. This is a GREAT way to differentiate between these two jobs more quantitatively. When we have someone moving from a Cook job to a Manager job, we have a clear idea of what the biggest gaps are.
When I do this, I download the ONET data and perform my own comparisons using the importance and the level measurements and I generate scatter plots to better visualize these dimensions. Here is an example of the scatterplot the abilities for these two jobs.
Elements in the bottom-left are not important for either job. Elements in the top-right are important for both. The line represents equal importance for both jobs. Then when dots show up above and below the line shows a different importance rating where it is rated more important in one job than the other. The closer these dots get to the upper-left or the lower-right indicates a bigger difference in rating.
This helps me not only see the differences but the amount of difference in a very quantitative way. I’m going to devote more time to those elements farther from the line than closer.